Michiko Itatani: Cosmic Codes
@ One After 909
906 N Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL 60622
Opening Friday, October 25th, from 6PM - 9PM
On view through Saturday, December 7th
We are thrilled to announce our upcoming solo exhibition Michiko Itatani: Cosmic Codes. Created between 2005 and 2019, the oil paintings range in size from monumental to miniature. They are a continuation of the personal and humanistic work that has always been at the heart of Itatani’s oeuvre: her personal reflections on culture, technology, and human behavior. While all of the featured paintings are in a primarily black and white color palette, Itatani’s works explore the grey areas of the human condition in an effort to make sense our complex reality.
Itatani began her artistic career as a writer, which is reflected in her work in the Japanese calligraphy that delicately details her paintings and the way each piece contains its own narrative like a chapter in a novel. She has developed painted vocabularies to articulate and make sense of the struggles of our society. Chiefly, she is concerned about climate change and the way much of the stress on our environment is caused by humans. Although the trajectory that we are currently on may seem bleak to some, Itatani remains forcefully optimistic.
This sense of optimism permeates each of her paintings wherein she illustrates the potential of humankind by creating worlds with multiple possibilities. Science fiction merges with relics of the past in her depictions of libraries, hallways, gardens etc. with symmetrical architecture. Geometric tesseracts and ephemeral orbs radiate an energy and light beyond “unthinkable” solutions without the fear of failure. Itatani’s reflective visions of reality provide us with a sense of hope for what we can still accomplish in our fleeting existence on earth.
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Tags: Chicago, Cosmic Codes, Michiko Itatani, One After 909, West Town
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